ISLAMABAD, Aug 22: Pakistan ranks 56th among the 184 countries affected by natural disasters from 1992 to 2001, the World Disaster Report (2002) of International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent (IFRC) societies said.

The report was released here at a press conference in a local hotel on Thursday, where federal Minister for Health Abdul Malik Kasi was the chief guest. It revealed that the number of people dying all over the world in disasters was lower this year as compared to last year. However, this year’s disasters left more people injured.

Besides the minister, Bob Mckerrow, head of the South Asia regional delegation of IFRC; Alan Bardbury, a member of the delegation, Nadeem Haider and Jamila Ibrohim also spoke on the occasion.

The minister observed in his speech that countries like Pakistan that were low on the scale of development were more vulnerable to disasters. He said a reactive approach to disasters added to the vulnerability in Pakistan, where the government, despite its limited resources, was supposed to be the saviour.

The report said international development targets set for the year 2015, such as halving the number of hungry people, would not be reached unless the heavy toll of disasters on the poor was reduced through effective measures.

In its tenth year of publication, the report called for disaster risk reduction targets, such as halving the numbers of people killed and affected by disasters and increasing the number of governments with dedicated plans and resources for risk- reduction programmes, to be added to the international development goals for 2015 and beyond.

The report also warned that thousands of lives were lost and millions of people affected each year because of the donors’ reluctance to invest in measures that reduced the impact of disasters. Last year alone, lives of 170 million people were disrupted by disasters worldwide.

Donors have been criticised for not living up to their own rhetoric for reducing the risk form disasters. Though a strong supporter of disaster-response efforts, the European Community Humanitarian Office (ECHO) spent just 1.5 per cent of its aid budget on disaster preparedness last year, the report added.

Mozambique, which suffered two years of devastating floods in 2000-2001, received only 15 per cent of the funds required to replace simple river and rain gauges for alerting communities to the danger, which had been destroyed by the floods, even though $470 million were pledged for reconstruction and rehabilitation by the international community.

There was also criticism of an over-reliance on high-profile aid operations to save lives when long-term investment in disaster mitigation was much more effective. The report said no international aid effort was necessary last year when the worst hurricane sine 1944 hit Cuba but left only five people dead in its wake. Local mechanisms were in place to evacuate 700,000 people from Havana and other threatened areas.

The good news in the report is that the numbers of people dying in disasters has dropped significantly. Natural and technological disasters claimed one million lives from 1982 to 1991 but only 620,000 from 1992 to 2001. It was largely due to an enormous drop in famine deaths in Africa.

However, the report shows that the number of people affected by natural disasters over the last ten years has nearly trebled since the 1970s, to two billion, and flags the upward trend with a warning about the threats of climate change, not just for the small island nations in the Pacific, but also for many densely populated coastal regions.